Apple's iCloud and iTunes see service outages, 20% of users affected

Apple's servers were hit with an unknown issue on Wednesday, with the company's iCloud service seeing a brief outage before a larger problem affected some 20 percent of all iTunes customers for nearly an hour and a half.

While the issue has since been resolved, Apple's iTunes Store was down from 4:25 p.m. to 5:45 p.m. Pacific, with the outage affecting one fifth of the service's users, according to company's System Status webpage.

Just before the iTunes complication, about 1.5 percent of iCloud users were unable to use the cloud computing service's document storage, Photo Stream, iPhoto Journals and Backup & Restore features. The iCloud downtime lasted from 12:44 p.m. to 1:33 p.m. PST.

It is unclear what caused the service interruption, and Apple has not commented on the issue.

A look at Tuesday's status report shows iCloud email service was down for 45 minutes, while "some users" of iCloud Documents, Photo Stream, iPhoto Journals and Backup & Restore saw trouble for nearly two hours during the early morning hours. During the downtime, users may not have been able to send or receive attachments in iMessage.

As the number of iCloud and iTunes users grows, Apple has consistently seen problems with its system. For example, April saw a spate of outages tied to iCloud email, GameCenter and iTunes, with Mail down for 27 hours.

Apple has never understood how to do services. Gotta leave that to Google, Amazon, and Netflix.

What the ****?

So Apple is the only one to do the perfect marriage between services and devices (how imessage works, for example), but because some servers have a problem (we don't know the nature of it) they don' "get it"?

But those companies that have been having problems lately, "get it"? I mean, Google and Amazon are 100% services (sellyoursoultothedevil. Inc) and they have big f*cking outages once in a while. Apple is much more than that (a services company) and only started "lately" and already have a similar/bigger sized operation.

So Apple is the only one to do the perfect marriage between services and devices (how imessage works, for example), but because some servers have a problem (we don't know the nature of it) they don' "get it"?

But those companies that have been having problems lately, "get it"? I mean, Google and Amazon are 100% services (sellyoursoultothedevil. Inc) and they have big f*cking outages once in a while. Apple is much more than that (a services company) and only started "lately" and already have a similar/bigger sized operation.

**** off.

Jesus who pissed in your corn flakes this morning?

The issue is that they go down...a lot! A hell of a lot more than Amazon and Microsoft do. Its a good service when its up and running although slow at times. They just need to make it more powerful and reliable.

I used to keep an iCloud Journal for photo sharing. About 1,000 images, perhaps 20 people accessing it. There was not a week that would go by that either I or one of my friends noted it was down. I left and came back a few months ago. It was down the day I wanted to load it as well as the next day. Down again last week.

Nice idea but it takes execution to make it happen. Something that appears missing these days. But then the only way to load it is with an iPad. Perhaps a half baked idea as well.

The issue is that they go down...a lot! A hell of a lot more than Amazon and Microsoft do.

Don't know about Amazon, but Microsoft's record for reliability is pretty poor as well. Google would be a better example, as that 27 hour mail outage Apple had in April is comparable to all the downtime that Gmail has in a regular year.

Doesn't iCloud leverage AWS and Azure for some/all of its services anyway?